Kaleo Legal

Kaleo Legal is designed for business. We aim to become part of our clients' executive teams, providing not just sophisticated legal services but business consulting advice as well. We are driven to recalibrate legal service norms.
Experienced attorneys often feel limited to partner track at big firms, or to the conventional in-house career. But those options aren't for everyone (or frankly, even most of us).
Our business model allows our attorneys to build satisfying careers, while also providing them the opportunity to balance family, community, and other interests.
OUR STORY
From the beginning

We started Kaleo Legal in 2008, determined to forge a better way to practice law. Having just left his position as Chief Legal Officer of a NASDAQ listed company, Brian Wainger recognized firsthand that the billable hour system skews the incentives for outside counsel, and fails to put the client's goals at the forefront of the relationship. So Brian began providing general counsel services on a flat fee, monthly retainer basis to his client. Tina McRae joined him in 2009, having previously spent her career as a full-time in-house lawyer at Norfolk Southern, and began serving as a fractional in-house counsel to NS. Billy joined them in 2014, after spending most of his career as lead counsel on large-scale intellectual property litigation around the country. He was drawn to the idea of redefining the relationship between client and outside counsel, on a basis other than billable hours, which Tina and Brian had perfected over the past several years. As a group, our attorneys aim to become part of our clients' executive teams, providing not just legal services but using our considerable experience to provide business consulting services as well. We are more than just our client's lawyers ? we are their business partners.
ABOUT US
What we do

We are not like other law firms. We don't bill by the hour, and we don't have large offices and support staff. Our firm was founded on the principle of providing sophisticated, experienced in-house counsel to our business clients, on a full-time or fractional basis, in a way that most closely approximates an employer-employee relationship.

That being said, our model is not to provide contract attorneys merely to fill seats in our clients' legal departments. To the contrary, we become an extension of our clients' in-house departments, expanding their capacity in a cost-effective manner with seasoned counsel, but without adding headcount to the company's payroll. We take a team approach to servicing our clients, providing direct access to each member of the firm whenever they need us.

Our primary objectives are to add value, experience, and expertise to the legal team, while at the same time reducing their workload and enabling them to achieve their legal and business objectives efficiently. Staying true to our founding principles, we have built a practice that consists of primarily two types of alternative fee arrangements: (1) a fractional general counsel practice, on a fixed monthly retainer, and (2) flat-fee, per-project arrangements for our niche areas of expertise.
What sets us apart

Because we have a strict policy of working with very little overhead at Kaleo, we are able to keep our fees low compared with larger law firms who have similar expertise and resumes. While we now have a full-time paralegal dedicated to our litigation matters, we utilize part-time secretaries, paralegals, and associates to expand our bandwidth while minimizing overhead. When we need to, we have relationships with staffing firms and part-time temps, upon whom we rely to ramp up for specific projects. Otherwise, we have a largely virtual practice, and each of us maintains physical offices at several of our clients' locations. Our ability to minimize costs is just one differentiator from most other firms with attorneys of our caliber, and it provides us with the flexibility to enter into any number of financial arrangements with our clients.

Locations	No. of Attorneys
Richmond, VA	3
Virginia Beach,	8

Practice Areas	No. of Attorneys
Antitrust and Competition	1
Entertainment and New Media	1
IP	4
Litigation - General (consumer)	1
Municipal Law	1